Eight Mexican migrants died on Monday afternoon when their pickup truck collided head-on with another vehicle during a high-speed chase involving state police on US Highway 277 in Val Verde County, Texas.
The Associated Press (AP) reported that the Texas Department of Public Safety (DPS) said, “troopers were chasing a red Dodge pickup truck” after the driver of the pickup “refused to pull over for a traffic violation.” The collision with the Ford F-150 occurred approximately 30 miles north of Del Rio, Texas, a town of 35,000 people across the Rio Grande from Ciudad Acuña, Mexico.
The AP reported that the driver and a child passenger in the Ford F-150 survived the crash and were hospitalized. One of the passengers in the Dodge pickup lived while the 24-year-old driver fled the scene on foot but was subsequently apprehended and booked by federal authorities. A spokesperson for the Texas DPS identified the driver as Sebastian Tovar.
All of the deceased, seven men and one woman, were undocumented immigrants from Mexico between the ages of 18 and 20. The report did not specify what the alleged traffic violation was that prompted the high-speed chase.
The horrific crash in Del Rio follows by two weeks a deadly collision in the Imperial Valley region of Southern California which claimed the lives of 13 people and injured many others when a semi-truck rammed into a Ford Explorer carrying two dozen passengers.
US news outlets moved quickly to blame the victims in Del Rio for their own deaths. The New York Post, for example, reported late Tuesday, “Authorities said they believed” the people in the pickup truck being chased by the state police were “part of an immigrant smuggling operation,” but no details were provided.
The latest mass death of migrants illustrates further the criminal policies of the Biden administration, which hypocritically promised a more “humane” US immigration policy upon taking office in January. As the World Socialist Web Site reported on Monday, the number of immigrant children being detained by the US government at the border with Mexico had risen from 3,200 to 4,200 in one week.
Instead of releasing the children to family members, the Biden administration is relocating these youth to a convention center in Dallas which is being called an “immigrant decompression center.” With these measures, the Democrats are proving that they are continuing and intensifying the anti-immigrant program carried out during the previous four years of the Trump presidency.
The Biden White House has steadfastly refused to refer to the record number of immigrants arriving at the US border in 2021 as a crisis and, instead, called it a “difficult” situation and blamed it on the Trump administration.
On Tuesday, Biden’s Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro N. Mayorkas said, “We are on pace to encounter more individuals on the southwest border than we have in the last 20 years,” and, “We are expelling most single adults and families. We are not expelling unaccompanied children.” In other words, unaccompanied children entering the US are not being “expelled” but are being detained and held in detention facilities and, increasingly, for periods of time that exceed the legal limit of 72 hours.
During an interview on Tuesday, ABC News’ George Stephanopoulos asked Biden about the surge of migrants and unaccompanied children, “Do you have to say quite clearly, ‘Don’t come’?” to which the President responded, “Yes, I can say quite clearly: Don’t come over.”
Biden then added, “Don’t leave your town or city or community.”